A Chechen woman based in the Austrian city of Graz has been sentenced to 12 months imprisonment for planning to join Islamic State fighters in Syria.
The woman and her family had fled to Austria to escape Chechnya’s civil war when she was four years old. Her family found work, and she was educated in Austrian system in Graz.
However, two years ago she became more religious and came into contact with a German radical who had converted to Islam several years before.
They decided to travel to Syria and get married there, with the man planning to join the terror group while the woman looked after their home.
She flew to Istanbul to meet him in March, from where they travelled to the city of Gaziantep. They then planned to take a taxi across the Syrian border, but were detained by police before they could leave the city.
The Graz court convicted her of associating with terrorists, with the prosecutor saying she had put her put her future family in the hands of the Islamic State terror group, The Local reports.
Two further Chechen girls will in court in Graz on Monday charged with assisting a terrorist organisation after they too planned to travel to Syria to marry Islamic State fighters.
The conviction comes as Austria struggles to deal with the large influx of migrants pouring over its borders.
Chancellor Werner Faymann said on Monday he was considering sending in the country’s army to help at the border, as migrants streamed into the small towns of Nickelsdorf and Heiligenkreuz, near the border with Hungary. In one day alone, some 14,000 people arrived at Nickelsdorf, which has a resident population of less than 2,000.
Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Germany have now all reinstated border controls due to the mass movement of migrants across the continent.
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